Can Solana's Seeker Phone Take Down the Apple and Google Duopoly?

When Solana first attempted to launch a crypto phone back in 2023, the reviews weren't all that good. But now, Solana Mobile is back with The Seeker, which bills itself as the “definitive Web3 mobile device."

Coinage received one for this review and we have to say, while it may look like a standard Android with standard 128 gigabytes of storage and a $500 price tag, the second iteration of a "crypto phone" represents much more than that. But before we get too deep into the specs, we should warn you — this isn't that type of review. Because asking how its hardware stacks up to other phones might already be missing the forest for the trees.

That was exactly the path that famed tech reviewer Marques Brownlee once asked in his brutal review of Solana’s first crypto phone, the Saga: “What the hell is a crypto phone and why would anyone want that?” Back then, his answer was simple: “There’s basically no reason for 99.9% of people to buy this.”

But this time around, Solana is trying to prove him wrong. And not just by dangling perks like bundled airdrops that can be worth more than the phone itself (though they’re still doing that, which we'll get into later.) But what makes the phone interesting is how it could be a real shot at taking on the moat that Apple has built since Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone years ago.

In 2008, Jobs didn't just walk out onstage in Cupertino to talk about the iPhone, he also unveiled the App Store — a gateway that turned a “phone” into the single most powerful distribution platform in the world. It was genius, and it made Apple a lot of money. But fast forward nearly two decades and the idea has basically become a duopoly between the App Store and Google's Play Store. As far as mobile operating systems go, Apple's and Google's now control nearly the entire global mobile market, taking as much as a 30% cut from all developer revenue in the process.

As Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko put it recently, “Apple and Google are not competing hard enough to bring down costs for developers. They’re all sitting very comfortable taking a 30% fee. When people talk about crypto disrupting a bank that takes 50 basis points, 30% is 3,000 basis points. It’s a lot.”

Plenty of others have tried to break the duopoly's stranglehold. Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, famously sued Apple and Google in 2020 and eventually won in 2025 as a jury ruled Google could not fully block others from competing with its Play Store. The Seeker's dApp store seems to be looking to capitalize on that newfound freedom, finally giving developers direct access to users without suffering the same 30% cut they've always been subjected to.

Of course, the chicken-and-egg problem looms large. Why would developers build apps if there aren’t enough users? And why would users buy a phone if there aren’t enough apps? Yakovenko admits it’s the same challenge Solana faced when bootstrapping its blockchain.

“We got to do this once with Solana and we’re trying to do this now with Seeker as well," he said recently at the SALT's Wyoming Blockchain Symposium.

So far, Solana seems to be pulling it off. More than 150,000 Seekers have already shipped to 50 countries, according to the company.

The real test, though, might come after the initial dust settles. Just as it was with the Saga, many have been excited about the airdrops that come with the Seeker. Airdrops that came with the phone were once again worth more than the phone's sticker price. But if people are still using this rendition once the giveaways have come and gone, Solana might have finally cracked the code on building a third mobile ecosystem that can chip away at the Apple-Google duopoly.

For now, the Seeker feels like more than just a phone. It’s a bet that crypto can replicate the same playbook it used against banks, only this time aimed at the most powerful gatekeepers of the digital era. And that's a hard thing not to be rooting for.

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